Pre-Māori settlement of New Zealand theories

Since the early 1900s the theory that Polynesians (Māori) were the first ethnic group to settle in New Zealand (first proposed by Captain James Cook) has been dominant among archaeologists and anthropologists.[1][2] Before that time and until the 1920's, however, a small group of prominent anthropologists proposed that the Moriori people of the Chatham Islands represented a pre-Māori group of people from Melanesia, who once lived across all of New Zealand.[3] While this idea lost favour among academics it was widely published and incorporated into school textbooks which has extended its life in the popular imagination.[4][5][6]

Some early visitors to New Zealand did speculate that the original New Zealanders might be descended from ancient Greeks, Romans or Egyptians, and some Christian missionaries thought that the Māori ancestors belonged to the lost tribes of Israel.[7] In more recent times, outside of academia a similar variety of speculation of New Zealand's first settlers has occurred. These ideas typically incorporate aspects of conspiracy theories as they are in opposition to the last 100 years of academic research.[8][9]

During the 19th century, ideas about Aryan migrations became popular and these were applied to New Zealand. Edward Tregear's The Aryan Maori (1885) suggested that Aryans from India migrated to the southeast Asia and then to the islands of the Pacific, including New Zealand.[13]

The writing of Percy Smith and Elsdon Best from the late 19th century theorised about pre-Māori settlement. Their work inspired theories that the Māori had displaced a more primitive pre-Māori population of Moriori (sometimes described as a small-statured, dark-skinned race of possible Melanesian origin), in mainland New Zealand – and that the Chatham Island Moriori were the last remnant of this earlier race.[3]

Although modern archaeology has largely clarified questions of the origin and dates of the earliest migrations, some writers have continued to speculate that what is now New Zealand was discovered by Melanesians, 'Celts', Greeks, Egyptians or the Chinese, before the arrival of the Polynesian ancestors of the Māori.[14][15] Some of these ideas have also been supported by politicians and media personalities.[6][16][17]

Martin Doutré argued in a 1999 book that New Zealand had a pre-Polynesian Celtic population, and that boulders with petroglyphs on a hill in Silverdale in Auckland are artifacts left by those people.[18] An earlier presentation of the theory of pre-Polynesian white settlement of New Zealand was Kerry Bolton's 1987 pamphlet Lords of the Soil,[19] which states that "Polynesia has been occupied by peoples of the Europoid race since ancient times".[20]

Other books presenting such theories have included The Great Divide: The Story of New Zealand & its Treaty, (2012) by Ian Wishart, a journalist, and To the Ends of the Earth by Maxwell C. Hill, Gary Cook and Noel Hilliam, which claims that New Zealand was discovered by explorers from ancient Egypt and Greece.[21]

David Rankin, a Ngāpuhi elder, has drawn attention to Māori legends suggesting that people, some of them with fair skin, were already present in the islands when Polynesians arrived, and has claimed the existence of a conspiracy among academics to suppress inquiry.[22][23]

Historians and archaeologists dismiss the theories. Michael King wrote in his history of New Zealand, "Despite a plethora of amateur theories about Melanesian, South American, Egyptian, Phoenician and Celtic colonisation of New Zealand, there is not a shred of evidence that the first human settlers were anything other than Polynesian",[24] and Richard Hill, professor of New Zealand Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, said in 2012, "Not one of [the theories] has ever passed any remote academic scrutiny."[22] Hugh Laracy of the University of Auckland called them "wild speculation" that has been "thoroughly disposed of by academic specialists".[23]

Another historian, Vincent O'Malley, and the New Zealand Archaeological Association regard the theories as having a racist or at least a political element, seeking to cast doubt on Waitangi Tribunal claims.[22][25] Scott Hamilton in "No to Nazi Pseudo-history: an Open Letter" further explains objections to the theories of Bolton and Doutré (and the website Ancient Celtic New Zealand).[26]